What the UN Got Right (and Wrong) about Human Rights
In December of 1948 the United Nations General Assembly adopted a “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” (UDHR) a response in part to particular atrocities wrought during the 1930s and 40s in the then war-ravaged nations of Europe and the South Pacific. The UDHR is impressive in many respects, being one of the few historical documents attempting to spell out specific human rights to be upheld and recognized. This is notably in stark contrast to the founding documents of the USA, which eschew any attempt to exhaustively enumerate rights, instead focusing on limiting the power and authority of government.
While the UDHR gets many things right, it also bungles the job in many respects, in certain parts of the document mixing up rights with utopian aspirations. Getting the logic of rights clear and accurate is of great importance, because properly distinguishing rights from factional aspirations crystalizes what defines a healthy civilization from an Orwellian nightmare. In this respect it is useful to study the UDHR, to understand what this singular document gets right and wrong about human rights.
You can read the UDHR directly, and I encourage you to do so. It is structured into 30 articles, each intended to define or describe a right or (in some articles) a collection of rights. The first 20 articles are mostly unassailable, emphasizing the equality of rights between different people, including freedom of thought and expressed opinion, equal standing before law and courts, rights to religious belief and conscience, freedom of movement, the right to marry, and the right against being enslaved, tortured, or arbitrarily detained. Article 17 though is perhaps the most important yet least understood among this first group of 20 articles: “Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.”
Concepts of ownership, property, and rights are central to the very idea of civilization, that the fruits of one’s contracts and labors are in effect an extension of the self, and that for human beings to live side-by-side in a cooperative and just way, your property must be treated as an extension of your person. Coercion or violence against a person’s property is a violation of the person. But there is a critical distinction between rights and property: You have a right to use your life’s energy, efforts, ingenuity, and/or associations to gain property; you do not have an inherent right to material wealth. And so “the right to own property” should never be construed as a right to some minimal quantity of material goods, confiscated elsewhere and handed over to you. The reason for this is simple. Rights must always be shared by all, equal and maximal, and as such you cannot claim the right to someone else’s labor, the fruits of someone else’s efforts. That would be a diminishment of another’s rights. So the “right to own property” is not a right to property, for property cannot be truly owned except through valid means of acquisition that fully respect the principle of equality and maximality of rights shared by all.
Unfortunately, it is on this very point of respecting the equality and maximality of rights that Articles 22-26 of the UDHR fail. Articles 22 and 23 respectively assert “rights” to social security and favorable remuneration. Article 24 asserts an entitlement to paid holidays, while Article 26 asserts a right to free education. All of these examples violate the equality and maximality of rights by imposing a coerced duty or burden on other people. Guaranteed “favorable” remuneration and paid holidays implies coercing employers into contractional obligations they have not freely consented to. Free education implies that someone is being coerced to be the educator, or at least coerced into paying for that education. By including Articles 22-26, the UDHR is saying essentially that a “right” can be something that unspecified others owe to you regardless of whether they have consented to provide such service to you. You ultimately have lost some of your own rights if my very existence places an obligation upon you to educate me or give me a nice high-paying job. Therefore, Articles 22-26 have introduced into the UDHR a deep logical and fatal inconsistency.
This inconsistency is actually much worse than just mischaracterizing a few things as rights which cannot be rights. There is a logic to understanding rights, whereby a sound logical system of rights-based principles can actually be the basis for a civilized world and human community. Principles of human rights are not complicated, and nowhere at any time have they ever been refuted. Instead tyrants get around the principles of human rights by gaslighting, by saying things are rights which are not rights, or convincing you that governments have special rights, or certain people have more rights than you, etc. The logic of rights is important, because it is by disrupting and disregarding the logic of rights that tyrants continue to violate rights. If any proposed set of principles like the UDHR contains an inherent inconsistency, basic rules of logic imply that any conclusion can be derived as a consequence of the inconsistency. So instead of being a beacon for understanding and upholding human rights, instead of being a potential foundation for all human civilization, the UDHR can lead to all manner of misinterpretations, false conclusions, and even injustice. By getting “rights” wrong, the UDHR is sadly now a tool for gaslighting the entire concept of rights and social justice, which then becomes the path to tyranny. And of course, our world continues to suffer every day because governments around the world either do not understand human rights or they deliberately obscure the logic of rights with appeals to selfish interests. Politicians everywhere pay lip service to the word “rights” while their actions and policies do not truly respect rights. A starting point to rebuilding our rights-based republic is to reaffirm the logic of rights.
